Wednesday, January 18, 2012

On SOPA: Better Safe than Sorry.

To be honest, I never thought twice about doing a SOPA post, because while so many people are nervous over the bill (see Reddit's r/SOPA), I never expected this to pass. I still don't expect it to pass, really. That said, I'm glad that at least two major sites, Reddit and Wikipedia, have blacked out for today in protest?

"But why? It's not like you thought it was going to pass anyways."

Ironically, it was this post, somebody who more or less agrees with me, that made me want to post this. From an itty bity little forum that nobody has ever heard of:

This all seems very silly. SOPA wasn't going to pass in the first place,
lobbying alone would have kept a bunch of 70-somethings with absolutely no idea
how the internet works from causing it to self-destruct, just like nearly every
other vast overreach of power in U.S. history, and even if it had Obama,
especially in an election year where young (read: internet reliant) people are
again going to be an important group for him, was always destined to veto the
f*** out of it. All this would have happened even if word about it didn't get
passed around faster than a drunk virgin in a frat house, but when it did, this
whole let's be overly dramatic and shut errything the f*** down thing became
rather useless.

But I'm glad everyone went ahead and got their panties in
a bunch anyway, and at the end of the day it's those silly websites losing ad
revenues, not me.

First off, Wikipedia doesn't even have ads; they run purely off of fundraising. Second, Google isn't shut down, they've just blacked out their logo, and Reddit is only shutting down for 12 hours in an effort to (hopefully) not affect international users. So yeah, they are losing somemoney, but nothing compared to the money they would lose if, for whatever reason, this ridiculous bill did pass and everything is shut down.

tl;dr: Better to protest now and alert Congress how the rest of the world feels about it, then to say nothing, and, oops! "D00d, Y cnt I do my hw on Wiki now?"

That said, why not have a little fun with some SOPA humor?

If you just search "Sopa" on Google images, you still get Pictures of Soup.

P.S. Facebook, you should have blacked out too, at least for something like, four hours.

P.S.S. Even if SOPA doesn't pass, there's a greater chance that PIPA could pass.﻿